Close to Home: The building is designed so that every employee will have a view.

The drawing of the building in this cartoon does not seem to match the description of the building in the caption. Unless you count the side of a building as "a view."

I will chalk it up to laziness.

F Minus and Close to Home: Okay, Rico. You skipped a duck. I'm very impressed.

Because they generally lack recurring characters, single-panel comics mostly have to rely on absurd situations to create humor. These situations are terrifically absurd. They are, therefore, quite humorous.

F Minus has been very good lately, by the way. In the event you don't read it already, you should probably make a point to start doing so.

Close to Home: See kids? This is a LETTER. A LETTER.

This cartoon is hilarious because this old, senile person has forgotten that everybody already knows what a fucking letter is.

Adam @ Home and Close to Home: I framed my kid's drawing and hung it up over there.

I for one am thrilled to see that the cartoonists populating the comics section have such an appreciation for the artists who came before them.

*Adam @ Home from 3-24-10.

Close to Home: It says here that men who make love twice a week live 12 years longer than men who are celibate You're trying to kill me, aren't you?

This cartoon is hilarious because why won't women have sex with men whenever men want to have sex with them? Don't they know that's why they exist in the first place?

Close to Home: I think it's going to be a pass play.

This cartoon is hilarious because this play could not possibly work.

Close to Home: ...

And people laughed at George W. Bush.

Close to Home: OK. Now open your oven door, please.

This cartoon is hilarious because the woman apparently ordered a 72 inch pizza.

Close to Home: Your wife has "Irritable Yowl Syndrome," Mr. Cromwell.

This cartoon is hilarious because women are shrews.

Close to Home: On weekends when they were in the modd to party, the young cats would do power shots of mice.

This isn't a bad cartoon, exactly. But I feel like it would make more sense if the cats were sitting around getting high on catnip or something. Catnip to pot is a far better parallel than mice to beer.

Rubes, Close to Home and Strange Brew: Internal logic in single-panel cartoons.

While single-panel cartoons tend to work by accentuating the absurd, it is nevertheless necessary for them to have a certain internal logic. Take Sunday's Rubes, for example. The premise of the cartoon is the old adage that a man's home is his castle. Taken to absurd literalness, it makes perfect sense within the world of the comic that homes would therefore come under siege from Hagar the Horrible like raiders. It's ridiculous, but the joke flows naturally from the premise.

Yesterday's Close to Home, on the other hand, doesn't make a whole lot of sense. The premise is that it's easy to vacuum up toys. The joke is that this particular mother has a hung a sign up on her wall indicating what noises various toys make when they get vacuumed up. But it's not at all clear just why she would hang up such a sign. What use is it, after all, to know the noises various toys make when they get vacuumed up?

The logic in today's Strange Brew is even worse. The premise is the idea of keeping an eye on something. The joke is that the characters in the cartoon are eyes. But that makes no sense at all. If, after all, you were an eye, you wouldn't have an eye. So you wouldn't be able to keep your eye on anything. I suppose you could keep yourself on something, but that doesn't sound right. And so the cartoon isn't so much amusing as it is perplexing and stupid.

Close to Home: Well, gentlemen, congratulations! Your experiments on enhancing intelligence have been quite successsful!

I liked this cartoon better when it was on television and called Pinky and the Brain.

Close to Home: Good. His wallet seems to be very full. Send him through to pre-op.

Golly, and now a joke about how health care is expensive.

Close to Home sure has been showing off some impressive originality lately.

Close to Home: I'd say you're looking at about $1,700.

Wow, I don't think I've ever seen a joke about how mechanics are sometimes dishonest before.